Thanks! It's a purple egg-sucking leech - that I tie mostly for use on the Methow River here in Washington. Not much different from a wooly bugger though, and they'll take those too. I'm not much of a fly tier, I can only seem to tie the bigger, uglier flies!

Thanks! It's a purple egg-sucking leech - that I tie mostly for use on the Methow River here in Washington. Not much different from a wooly bugger though, and they'll take those too. I'm not much of a fly tier, I can only seem to tie the bigger, uglier flies!

Regards, Guy

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Guy: if they eat them flies you tie, it must be because they are good enough. I often tie flies that dont look like nothing named, and trout will hit them anyway. So I guess it is just a matter of hunger, luck, and good fly presentation or movement.
That looks like a really nice river for fly fishing.
Thanks for the pictures, I enjoyed them.

Never got into tying flies, but I have caught bass on wooden plugs that I made from broom handles.

One is a fast skittering baby blackbird imitation that I modeled afte trolling birds used for high speed trolling for marlin and such in the ocean. Painted jet black with red spots at the wing roots. Think of a Jitterbug that you reel in as fast as a high speed spinning reel will go, with water spraying 3 feet on either side of the lure. I cut the lure in half, hollowed it out and glued it back together to keep it light and high on top of the water, just skipping across the surface like a baby blackbird trying to take off. It has caught bass when nothing else worked, as they had never seen such an artificial lure before. I call it a Jitterbird.

Another one was patterned after a Lucky 13 bass plug, the first artificial bass lure I owned as a kid, and as luck would have it, it was taken to Canada that summer and I caught my first rainbow trout on that Lucky 13. My modification was to cut my broomhandle copy in half and make it jointed for more action, and to grind the left and right sides flat for a more realistic fish profile. The top was painted blue with silver spots, the sides were white with black spots, and the bottom was red with yellow spots. All three color combinations were popular on bass poppers and plugs when I was a kid.....so I decided to use all three color combinations on a single lure. It worked.....that lure caught bass better than I ever had a right to expect, as unorthodox as it looked. I called it the Crazy Clown. It was a bit unstable and would alternately roll over on its left side then its right side just under the surface during retrieve, and I guess that made it look sick or wounded, which triggers a response from bass. It could also be worked fast in shallow Ozark Mountain streams without hanging up on the bottom, which was the bane of the Krokodile spoon, which is an otherwise deadly lure and far underrated and unknown by many bass anglers, at least as deadly as the Rapala minnow if not for the fact it sinks deep and hangs up a lot.

Not sure what any of that has to do with fly fishing for steelhead, but it's pretty cool that you were making your own lures and catching bass with them. Good deal. I'll fish for bass, perch, trout, even carp - but my favorite are salmon & steelhead.